Is it an impressive number like 20,000? Great! 

But then, follow up by answering this question, “What percentage of subscribers, on average, open your emails? What percentage click on the links?” 

If these numbers make you a little embarrassed — you may have low engagement. But it’s not something to be embarrassed about at all. In fact, it’s an incredibly-common issue for everyone from small non-profit hobby clubs to behemoth enterprise retailers. 

But if you have single-digit open rates and microscopic click-through rates, it is time to take action. Your list is a valuable email marketing asset that needs to be nurtured and protected. Today, we’ll talk about how to overcome low email engagement. 

Why low email engagement is a big problem

A disengaged email list becomes problematic when you keep sending out emails that hardly anyone is opening or reading. To the email blocklists and spam filters, you’re beginning to look like a spammer. If the problem continues, they’ll begin filtering your emails into spam folders or even blocking your marketing emails from getting delivered altogether. 

This means you’ll not only have low engagement, but also poor email deliverability.

Poor deliverability will take your open rates from bad to abysmal. And, in fact, this may already be happening if you’ve had low email engagement for a while.

The more obvious problem with a disengaged email list is that if no one is opening your emails, you’re not achieving the intended results with your email marketing campaigns. You need your customers and subscribers to regularly engage with your emails. No one is going to open every one of them. But everyone is happier if your open rates can remain — at minimum — in the teens. But over 20-30% is even better. 

So, what can you do if you have a disengaged email list? 

It seems like a big problem, because you’re trying to get people who are already ignoring you to stop ignoring you — by sending them more of what they’re ignoring. 

Fortunately, there are strategies you can use to identify and fix an email list with low engagement.

How to fix low email engagement

If you’re committed to maximizing the impact of your hard-earned email list, you’ll want to improve engagement rates as soon as you notice a problem. It’s a system you should add to your marketing tasks on a semi-regular basis — perhaps annually — to achieve and maintain strong results. 

Here are the steps to improve low email engagement rates: 

1. Assess your current email marketing habits

Let’s consider a few questions you can use to assess your current email habits.

How often are you sending emails?

Some companies are sending too many emails, and their subscribers have tuned out. Others are sending too few emails, and their subscribers have forgotten about them. Others are very inconsistent. 

Do any of these describe your email sending habits? 

Which segments of your email list are you focusing on?

Are you just blasting out emails to your entire list every time, or are you attempting to send more targeted and segmented emails to portions of your list, at least some of the time? 

If all your emails go to everyone and you have low email engagement, this is a key area you can work on to get some pretty impressive results.

What type of content do you send?

Do you vary the types of content you send out, or is it mostly all the same stuff? If every email you send is about the best deals ever and how time is running out, you’ve trained your subscribers to ignore you. 

Are your emails over-designed? Too long? Too short? Again — look at what you’re doing, and 

consider alternative approaches to shake things up. 

Are you in a subject line rut?

There are many types of subject line strategies. Are you using the same basic approach every time? Look back at the subject lines for the last 100 emails you’ve sent out. See if you’re being too predictable.

2. Send a re-engagement email campaign

Create a segment of all unengaged contacts — subscribers who haven’t opened an email for at least six months. If you have low email engagement, this may be a majority of your subscribers. That’s okay. 

With that segment, create a campaign specifically designed to win them back and re-engage them. These are sometimes called winback campaigns. 

There are a few ways to run a winback campaign, but here are the main components:

• Use a crystal clear subject line like, “Do you still want to get our emails?”
• Create a desirable offer 
• Make it a three-email campaign to make sure most people in this segment see it
• Remove anyone who doesn’t open any of these three emails from your list

Yes, unsubscribe them yourself. This might be painful, but it’s super important. Why? Because by removing inactive subscribers, you’ll improve your open rates automatically, and get off the radar of spam filters. These people are likely never going to re-engage (at least not during this stage of their life) if they don’t respond to this campaign. 

The desirable offer could be many things — a discount, a contest, a special opportunity — but it needs to be something you can fit in the subject line. This is another reason to make this a three-email campaign. That way you can use three different attention-getting subject lines that will speak directly to a disengaged subscriber.

It’s their last chance. So give them every reason to respond before you remove them. 

3. Alter your content strategy

Whatever you have been doing isn’t working. So stop doing it. 

Maybe you’ve been afraid to make direct sales offers, and have been mostly sending out content you think is valuable and useful. That’s good to do. But if that’s all you’ve been doing, maybe most subscribers joined to find deals and they just need to get some straight-up great offers now and then. 

To be fair, that’s unlikely to be the problem. Sending valuable content is a great strategy. The more likely scenario is that you’ve overwhelmed your subscribers with lots of sales over time, so they’re becoming numb. 

Here are a few content strategy ideas you can try out:

• Introduce more interactive elements like polls and quizzes
• Use more humor, including GIFs and memes, as well as written copy
• Implement a wider, more unpredictable, range of content — sales, educational guides, fun stuff, shareable memes, great stories, etc.
• Speak to the problems and concerns of your customers

Email example from Really Good Emails

The bottom line here is simple — whatever you’ve been doing with your email content, stop doing it and try another approach. 

4. Adjust your sending frequency

If you’re sending inconsistently, you need to figure out a way to schedule time to create emails so you can start sending on a regular basis. A great way to do this is to write multiple emails all at once. 

For example, suppose you want to send out one email per week. That’s a good frequency. It doesn’t overwhelm your subscribers (or your schedule), but it’s enough to stay on their minds and relevant in their lives. Write all four emails for the month in one day, and then schedule them to go out once per week. This is much easier for you than sitting down every week and having to come up with an email. This will also improve your writing quality because you’ll get in more of a rhythm. 

If you’re sending too many emails, figure out a slower pace, and decide what you’re doing too often so you can reduce that type of content. 

5. Alter your subject line approach

Another cause of low open rates is that your subject lines just aren’t attracting enough attention. Maybe they’re too bland. Maybe they’re too extreme and everyone is numb to it. Maybe you’re putting their first name in every single subject line and it’s gotten old.

Just like with your email content, you can’t use any single subject line strategy for every email, because your subscribers will get bored and start feeling like they don’t need to open it.

So, vary your approach. Here are a few proven strategies to use:

• Curiosity. You won’t believe what this cat did
• Urgency. Respond by Friday the 11^th to keep getting our emails
• Humor. Forget about us? It’s okay, we forgot about you too
• Direct. Check out these brand new products
• Personalized. For parents — something to do after the kids are in bed
• Personality. Make this your own way of speaking

Again, if you use any of these exclusively, it gets old. Use all of them. Use emojis. Write something abnormal. Use all caps for one word now and then. Put their first name in there. Try all sorts of things. But don’t do anything every time. 

5. Start segmenting to increase relevance

Segmentation is powerful. Every business has categories of products, or various service options, or different subscription tiers, or customers who have been there for vastly different amounts of time, or demographic data on your subscribers. You have some way to segment your subscribers.

The simplest way to segment is by engagement level. You can create segments based on who has opened and clicked more emails. 

The next simplest is demographics, like the example above “for parents.” If you have data like this on your subscribers, you could send that email just to the parents on your email list. Then, it’s only being seen by people for whom it’s relevant. And, perhaps more importantly, people who aren’t parents won’t see messages that don’t mean anything to them. This combination results in higher open rates. 

Send stuff only to college students or only to people over 55 years old, or only to people who own their homes. Whatever information you have about your subscribers, you can create segments for those, and then send more targeted messages that’s designed only for them.

6. Create a video

This is a great item to put in your re-engagement campaign. Why? Because videos increase engagement.

Create a video expressing that you’re changing some things in your business, and you’d love to see everyone get excited about it and start participating with your marketing emails again. Or create a video for a new product, or to advertise whatever offer you’re putting in the campaign.

Whatever you do — get the word “video” in the subject line, because that will get more people to open it. 

7. Make sure your tech is working

If you’re going to re-activate dormant subscribers, the absolute worst thing would be for them to try to re-engage, and then the button doesn’t work, or the poll doesn’t work, or the coupon code doesn’t work on the checkout page. 

Be absolutely certain that whatever links and website assets you’re using as part of your campaign are working correctly. Preview your emails, click all the links, fill out your own forms, and make sure everything functions as it should.

8. Make CTA buttons clear and compelling

If you get even a fair number of your dormant subscribers to re-engage, you have done a mighty deed. 

You’ll have a much better chance of making this happen if you write excellent button copy for your call to action. This isn’t the place for bland and generic stuff like “learn more” and “buy now.” 

Email example from Really Good Emails

No. You want something more like this:

• Grab your 25% off coupon today!
• Yes! I want in!
• Gimme my discount
• Take the quiz and see your results

Be specific with your call to action, based on whatever your email is offering. 

10. Attract new email subscribers

Really, this is what it may come down to. If you have an email list with 20,000 subscribers, but your open rates are consistently around 5%, that means only a few thousand of those people are regularly engaging with your emails. 

So if you run a successful winback campaign, you may still end up having to delete half your email list if large numbers of them don’t respond. And that could happen. If your marketing emails are already going to the spam folders for many of those subscribers, they may not see any of these re-engagement emails. They’re done. It doesn’t serve you to keep them on your list because it draws away resources and dilutes your data about what’s working well for those who are still engaged. 

What you can always do is attract new subscribers. And if you use the strategies from this article, you’ll be much more likely to keep those new subscribers engaged and interested, and looking forward to hearing from you. 

Cutting inactive subscribers and adding new ones is the fastest way to dramatically increase your open rates. 

Learn more: How MailPoet can help you manage your inactive subscribers

 For almost any business, you want your first-time customers to become repeat customers, because it’s a lot easier to sell to them again than it is to get new ones to buy for the first time. And the best way to engage customers after their first purchase is to follow up with post-purchase emails.

Why post-purchase emails work

Repeat business is the surest path to long-term growth and stable profits. 

After a new customer makes a purchase, you’ve met their need and they’re satisfied, for now. But they’re going to have new needs that your other products, or the same one they just bought, can meet in the future. 

The problem is, with online businesses, it’s easy to be forgotten. It’s not like a brick-and-mortar store, where the store itself can serve as a reminder, assuming the customer drives by it now and then. 

Online, the more competition, the harder it is to be found, even by a repeat customer. So, you might assume that, to market to existing customers, you have to go back to PPC ads, display ads, SEO, paid social media, and all the other strategies for getting found online.

But once someone has made a purchase, you can bypass all of those expensive tactics and just market to new subscribers directly via email. 

Post-purchase emails work because they keep your business and its products on the minds of your new customers long after their initial purchase. Following up after a purchase makes it much more likely the new customer won’t forget about you.

When to send post-purchase emails

The kinds of emails we’re talking about are not just purchase confirmations and other automated transactional emails like shipping updates. Those matter, but don’t always engage and deepen your relationship with the customer long-term. Once the processing of an order is complete, they’re no longer relevant, and ongoing email marketing to customers who’ve become subscribers should now take over.

Effective post-purchase emails are sent out consistently, starting within a day or two of the initial purchase, and continue weekly, twice a month, or some other interval that is appropriate for your business. And they should continue indefinitely. 

Post-purchase email ideas you can use today

You can divide your array of email follow-up ideas into two categories: Emails with offers and emails that nurture the customer relationship. 

Follow-up emails with offers

Before you even send your first post-purchase email offer, you should include an upsell right on the Checkout page, or on the thank you page. You can offer a product that complements the one that they’re buying, such as a carrying case, or a different flavor or color. 

In other scenarios, you can just offer more of what they already bought. For example, if they’re buying one, offer them two for under twice the price. 

Upsell emails

Whether you offer upsells at the point of purchase or not, you can include them again in a post-purchase upsell email. Since this email is being sent after the purchase, you could offer the same complementary product at its normal price or at a slight discount. Or, if you do a checkout upsell like this, promote a different complementary product in the email.

If the upsell is featuring more of what they already bought, since the email will reach them after the purchase, offer at least two more of the same item for a slight discount. In other words, “Since you already have one, why not stock up and save money?”

Friends and family discount offers

For some businesses, you can get customers to bring in friends and family and give them a discount. You’ll be winning more new customers, while encouraging a second purchase from the first one. You can do all this with just one email. 

Referral emails

Offer a reward to customers who refer someone else to your business, and include instructions in the email for how your process works. First-time customers can be offered this opportunity very soon after buying.

Loyalty program emails

If your business has a loyalty program, post-purchase emails are a great way to get people signed up. If you include links in the email, they can sign up right away, and now they’re incentivized to make repeat purchases.

Thank you emails

Sending a simple and sincere thank you email is about the easiest thing to do, and a no-strings-attached thank you email will be received well by just about anyone. To measure engagement, you could also include a link to a video with a message of gratitude, or a link to something funny or entertaining on your site or on your social media accounts.

MailPoet has a dedicated feature for setting up and deploying personalized, automated thank you emails for a customer’s first purchase. After a one-time set up, it goes to work for you time and time again. 

Emails with thank you discounts

If you want to do a bit more and make your gratitude for your customers’ business a little stronger, you could include a discount on their next purchase. Once you win that second purchase, it’s easier to get the third. So, offering a thank you discount might be a great strategy to try.

Follow-up nurturing emails

Nurturing emails don’t attempt to make an additional sale. They’re focused more on giving value to the customer, so the new buyer develops a positive feeling about your company. 

You want to send these out consistently, as discussed earlier. No single nurturing email is going to win a customer for life. It’s about staying in front of them and delivering relevant, valuable, desired content, over time.

Emails with valuable content

Probably the most common type of nurturing email is one that just sends pure content. It might include a link to a blog post, a video, or a podcast. It could include a special report, insider information, helpful content related to their purchase or product category such as a how-to video, and many other types of content. 

If this email includes a link to the content, it must “sell” that content, even though it’s free. People won’t just automatically click on your links. 

Product surveys

Surveys are a great way to engage new customers and show that you value their opinions, experiences, and input. To increase the chances of them filling out your survey, you can also include an incentive for completion. 

Review emails

You can also send emails that ask for reviews. To make it easy to leave reviews and to get more new customers to fill them out, include a link that takes them straight to wherever they will leave the review.

Emails with customer success stories

Testimonials and success stories work after the sale just as well as before. After the sale, they reassure your new customer that they’ve made a smart purchase and are working with a good company. Plus, your success stories might give them ideas for other things to buy.

Again, you can send nearly all of these nurturing emails over and over again. Each good customer success story you have in your records can become its own email. And it should be — don’t cram multiple stories in one email. So if you have ten of them, you have ten emails you can send out. If you did one success story per month, that’s almost a full year’s worth of messaging. 

Introduction emails

You can also send nurturing emails that introduce the customer to key employees or staff. You might introduce the owner, the manager, or the founder. You might introduce an all-star employee, or celebrate a recent employee of the month.

And don’t hold back on sharing a few personal details from the lives of these people, if they are okay with it. The more personal the connection between customer and business, the more likely they will buy again. So, if the owner’s kids are graduating high school, let your customers know about it. A new baby born to an employee? Share the good news via email. 

Social media emails

You can also deepen engagement by getting your new customers to follow you on your social media accounts.

It’s easy to include social buttons at the bottom of your emails. But you can also create entire emails that do nothing but “sell” your social media. And again, make each email about one thing. Suppose you have Facebook and Instagram accounts. Make a separate email to promote each one. In fact, make several, because not everyone will respond the first time.

When you post something on any of your social channels that you think your new customers might like to hear about, write up a quick email and send it out. You’ll stay in front of your new customers and give them another way to hear from you. 

Need a better way to manage your email marketing?

MailPoet offers everything an online business needs to run email marketing. The platform includes automation, templates, data tracking, and everything else required to execute an effective email marketing program, including post-purchase emails to your new customers.

Think about it: Just a few of the many tasks on your plate include marketing, customer service, communication, and nurturing leads and new prospects. Each of these can quickly monopolize your time and leave other critical aspects of your business unattended. Marketing automation software enables you to manage those tasks more effectively. 

And it works. The average ROI from marketing automation is $5.44 per dollar spent, according to Nucleus Research, and email is the most frequently utilized form of marketing automation, with 65% of marketers taking advantage of it in some form. 

Use this guide to learn all about email marketing automation – what it is, how it works, and the steps you can take to grow while opening up more time for other parts of your business and life.

What is email marketing automation?

In essence, email marketing automation tools allow you to send out messages without you needing to be involved each and every time. You create an email once, and through the use of triggers that fire when a visitor takes certain actions on your website or in response to other emails, your email automation software sends that message automatically. 

When you hear about people running businesses online in their sleep, email automation is part of what they’re talking about. You could be on vacation, out for dinner, or sleeping at 2:00 in the morning, and if a website visitor takes a particular action, they’ll receive an appropriate email from you right at that moment.

That’s email marketing automation. 

It’s a trigger-based approach to email that enables you to stay in touch and respond to customers across a vast array of situations, all without having to lift a finger – once your automation structure is in place. And that part does take some work on the front end. But once it’s set up, it just keeps running.

What is the difference between automated and broadcast emails?

Broadcast or batch emails are marketing emails that go out to your entire email list. They usually get sent out in batches, not all at once, to improve deliverability. Segmented emails go out to portions of your customer base. Both these types of emails are typically created by an email copywriter, and perhaps a larger marketing team. If you own a small business, you may do this yourself or hire a freelancer. 

Then, these broadcast-style emails are sent out or scheduled manually. If it’s to a segment of your email list, your team will have to identify and create that segment if it doesn’t already exist. 

These have their place in your email marketing strategy, but are separate from true email marketing automation – a person still has to do the work in order for that email to go out.

With automated emails, they go out even if no one is working at your entire business. They’ll go out even if the power is out, because your email servers aren’t located at your business, but through an email service provider such as MailPoet. 

Examples of automated emails

Here are a few of the most popular and effective types of automated emails that just about any business can use to nurture leads, engage customers, and make more sales.

Welcome emails 

When new customers visit your website and fill out a form to join your email list, what happens? In addition to being added to your list, they should receive a welcome email, or even better, a welcome series.

The welcome email introduces new leads and prospects to your business. It should offer them some type of reward for signing up, such as a coupon, a free guide, a video, or some other quick win. Your welcome series could also introduce your brand, products, and services, connect them with your social media accounts, send them helpful information such as popular blogs or useful web pages, and make them feel welcome and valued. 

A good email welcome series will make sales on the spot, or engage and nurture the new customer so they make purchases later. And it goes out automatically to anyone who joins your list.

Webinar registration emails 

When someone signs up for a webinar, they should receive an immediate confirmation email in their inbox. This reassures them you know what you’re doing, for one, and that their registration didn’t get lost in the abyss. More importantly, it increases the chances they will actually attend the webinar. 

The best webinar automated emails will again be a series, not just single emails. You will create a series of messages before the date of the webinar, and they will get sent out automatically, as the date gets closer, to everyone who registers. 

Free gift or download emails

One way to grow your email list is to offer something free that’s useful or desirable to your target audience, in exchange for their email address. While this might seem like just another version of a welcome email, it’s a little different because this automated email will be written specifically to ‘re-sell’ whatever free item they just requested. 

If it’s an eBook, a guide, a video, a podcast, or a report, you’ll want them to actually read, watch, or listen to it. So this email will promote the benefits of your content and get your new prospects excited to consume it.

If it’s a promotional offer like a first-time customer coupon or special deal, the email will encourage them to use it. Again, just because you send out a coupon doesn’t mean the recipient will buy something. You still need to make the sale. The automated email series motivates that purchase.

Quiz or survey completion emails

If you run a quiz or a survey on your website or through another service, everyone who takes your quiz should receive an email once they have finished. This email might share the results of the survey. It might include a reward of some sort for completing it, and should connect them to other resources on your website. 

It should also just say “thank you,” because they took time to participate.

Post-purchase follow-up emails

After a customer makes a purchase, they need to hear from you. You need to thank them. You also want to give them the chance to send feedback or write a review about the product, or about their customer service experience. For some products, you may include a tutorial PDF or video. 

You can create a post-purchase email that’s specific to every one of your products. 

Email automation like this can be set up to send follow-up emails if the customer doesn’t respond to the first one. This type of email series can also be used to promote a subsequent purchase by offering them new deals or informing them about other products related to what they just bought.

Emails to lapsed or inactive contacts

You can also set up email automation that attempts to engage customers after they have been inactive for a certain amount of time, such as a year. These pre-written emails will offer some kind of deal or opportunity for the customer to re-engage. This could be a free offer, such as a video, interview, new report, or something of that nature. Or, it could be a coupon or one-time promotional offer.

These types of emails accomplish more than just re-engaging lapsed customers. They also help you keep your email list clean. When customers don’t respond to these emails, you may want to remove them from your email list, as they may have abandoned that account.

Abandoned cart emails

This is one of the most profitable types of email marketing automation. According to Experian, customers who receive abandoned cart emails are 2.4 times more likely to complete their purchase than customers who hear nothing. 

These emails can be set to trigger automatically after a shopping cart gets left with items in it for a certain amount of time. Here’s more about how to use abandoned cart emails. 

Personalized automated emails

Customers appreciate personalized marketing because it’s relevant to them. You can personalize emails based on a number of factors, such as:

• Categories of products they’ve purchased
• Demographics like age, gender, or family status
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Past purchase dates

For example, you might have a couple of automated email campaigns built around each of your product categories. Each year, you can send out those campaigns to any customer who has made a purchase of something from that category. They’ll see this email as relevant to them, and be more likely to respond. See how to set up category-specific email automations.

Likewise, you can set up emails to go out automatically on birthdays, with special promotional messages and offers to make your customers feel special. 

Triggered automated emails

More complicated email automation systems may include workflows that involve a series of triggers that go out depending on what a customer does. 

For example, suppose you send out an email asking if a segment of your customers wants to receive a video that will be coming out soon. Each customer who clicks ‘yes’ will be added to an email sequence built around that video. And within that sequence, you could have another sequence that goes out to anyone who watches the whole video, and a separate one that goes to people who only watch the first few minutes. 

This sort of email marketing automation is much more complicated than most of the other types listed above. But once you have it set up, it can play a big role in growing your business. Not every email automation platform offers that level of complexity.

How email automation helps small businesses

What are the benefits of email automation? Here are a few of the biggest wins for small businesses that use email automation software.

Saves time

What you can achieve with email automation, you simply could not do any other way without abandoning all of your other important responsibilities. Imagine having to track all the shopping carts and send out emails to each customer manually, listing the items they left in their carts. That simply isn’t going to happen. 

Or imagine having to send out a welcome series every time someone joins your email list, or every time someone buys anything from your online store, if you have one. For businesses with consistent levels of traffic, you’d need a whole team of people to keep up with all this. 

Marketing automation software allows you to serve customers immediately in ways that matter to them, regardless of how small your business is or how much it grows. Scaling your business has little effect on how hard your email automation has to work.

Increases revenue

Back to the abandoned cart statistic we mentioned earlier – you make more sales by sending out automated emails. Welcome series and other emails that trigger when a customer requests something simply lead to more revenue. Promotional emails that go out based on product categories or other personalized information will help you make sales you would’ve otherwise missed.

You’ll be selling to more people, in more situations, and more frequently than you ever would if you tried to do all of this manually. 

Keeps customers engaged

Customers are bombarded with communications and marketing. You have to stay on top of their minds or they’ll eventually forget about you. Email is the single best way to do that because it costs so little to send messages out.

Automated email marketing enables you to keep existing customers engaged without you having to do all the work. They are reminded of your business and their past involvement, and you stay relevant to them.

Improves retention rate

Engaged customers are more likely to make second purchases. Email marketing automation thus increases your customer lifetime value. First-time customers become second-time customers. Members stay longer.

Encourages word of mouth

When customers feel well-treated, they’re more likely to write positive reviews and testimonials. With automated email campaigns, you can not only more consistently ask for reviews as part of your post-purchase email series, but you’ll get more good reviews because your customers feel important and valued.

How to get started with email automation

At this point, you’re probably pretty excited about adding email automation to your marketing strategy. Or if you already are using email automation, perhaps you’ve discovered a few new ideas to add to your existing efforts. 

Either way, here’s a step-by-step blueprint for how to create an automated email marketing campaign.

Step 1: Choose an email marketing automation platform

Lots of people wonder if you can automate emails in Gmail or Outlook. The short answer is “no.” Those aren’t designed for sending out mass emails for businesses, and you can’t set up triggers based on particular situations to individual customers. 

You need to use an email service provider that offers marketing automation, such as MailPoet. Different platforms offer different levels of automation, and you need to find one that has the capabilities that you’ll need. 

For example, for an online store using WooCommerce, MailPoet works very well because it fully integrates with the platform and offers many of the automated emails you’ll want to use. And even if you’re not an online store, MailPoet works seamlessly with any WordPress-based website. 

Other email marketing platforms may specialize in the more complicated automated workflows and trigger-based sequences that some businesses desire. The one you choose depends on the type of automated emails you want to send out, as well as cost, learning curve, and convenience. 

Step 2: Upload your email list

If you’re starting email marketing for the first time, you’ll need to upload your email list – whatever you have on hand at the time. The sooner you get your existing customers engaged with email, the sooner you can create automated email campaigns that will benefit them. 

What if I don’t have an email list?

That’s okay! Email automation actually makes it much easier to grow and maintain an email list. 

If you create some incentives for visitors to your website and social media pages to join your email list, you can use basic email automation like a welcome series to engage those new email subscribers and convert them into customers.

A study from VentureBeat found that automated emails produced 180% higher conversion rates than bulk or batch emails. Your welcome series, even if that’s the only email automation you use, will increase your conversion rate compared to what you’d achieve just by sending out regular marketing emails.

To grow your email list, start offering coupons, free guides or other valuable content, and various incentives that will make people want to join your list. Then, use a welcome series to engage and later convert them into customers.

MailPoet shines again here with easy-to-use email signup forms for WordPress. 

Step 3: Determine your campaign goal

The goal depends very much on the type of email automation and who will be receiving it. The goal of an abandoned cart email is obvious – to lead to a completed purchase.

But what is the goal of your welcome emails? It could be to get new email subscribers to follow you on social media. It could be to encourage clicks through to your website, blog readership, video views, requests for a free guide, sign ups for a free consultation, or demo or trial registrations. 

There are many more possible campaign goals for a welcome series. Decide what you want each of your automated campaigns to achieve.

Step 4: Create your email campaign assets

A successful email campaign of any sort, including automated emails, requires more than just the email itself. The assets for each email campaign may differ slightly, but here are the most common items you’ll need:

• Opt-in, registration, or other signup form on your website that triggers automated emails
• Landing page – the page you link to in your email
• Graphics – photos, charts, GIFs, other graphic design elements related to the campaign
• Free stuff like PDFs, eBooks, videos – whatever you promised that motivated the customer to trigger the automated email
• Call to action (CTA) text and buttons
• Coupon codes, if applicable

You have to think through what you’ll need for each campaign. When a customer or lead sees this email, what do you want them to do in response? What happens when they click on your links or buttons? Those are your campaign assets. 

And if anything on your website needs to happen in order to trigger an automated email, those are also campaign assets. 

Step 5: Outline your automated emails

Once your assets are in place, you can write the actual emails and subject lines. Some of these emails may be very short, such as last-minute webinar reminders or abandoned cart emails. 

But whatever you create, remember that once these are done, they are done and you don’t have to write them again. You may need to update them from time to time, but for the most part, automated emails are known as evergreen marketing assets, because they never expire or get old. 

Step 6: Create your emails

If you’re working with an email developer, they can custom code your messages and upload finished HTML emails into your email service provider (ESP).  

However, for the most part, you’ll work within your email service tool to design and create the emails using some type of drag-and-drop builder. MailPoet, for example, has a number of WordPress email templates you can use as a foundation to make this process much quicker. 

Depending on your ESP, you’ll likely be able to integrate shortcodes that automatically input information stores on their system – like the first name of a subscriber, the exact product the email recipient was looking at before they abandoned their cart, and more. 

Step 7: Create the triggers for each email

Each email service provider has its own method to create automated email workflows. There will be some sort of process for setting up triggers. 

For free downloads, registrations, opt-ins, and anything based on a button on your website, clicking that button must trigger email messages automatically. For automation based on something the customer clicks in the email itself, the trigger will fire based on that link or button. 

Abandoned cart emails get sent out based on how much time has elapsed since they put the items in their cart. So you’ll need an ESP that interacts with your WooCommerce platform. Same with emails based on categories purchased. 

Figure out the process for each automated email you create, and set up your triggers.

Step 8: Check your email automation setup and run a test

When possible, especially when you’re just getting started, run tests to ensure that your email automation is working. 

Use a personal email address and sign up for your newsletter. Does the welcome series arrive in your inbox? Does it show up in your spam or promotions folders, or in your main inbox? Do the graphics show up? Do the links work?

Put some items in a shopping cart on your online store, and leave them there. See if the abandoned cart email shows up when it’s supposed to. 

Category purchase emails and lapsed customer automated emails will be harder to test, but once you’re confident you’ve set up the simpler ones correctly, you’ll have more confidence you’ve done the other ones right, too.

Step 9: Sit back and watch it work

Every now and then, go in and monitor your automated emails to make sure they’re still working. You should see metrics such as opens and clicks associated with these emails over time, and that’s your best indication that they’re working.

If people start buying the things you’re selling through automated emails, using coupons, and returning to their abandoned carts, you’ll know it because the money will be in the bank. 

Plus, most platforms have an option to track metrics for email engagement performance. MailPoet even has a way to specifically track the real-world ROI of your campaigns. 

Get started with email marketing automation with MailPoet

According to the Direct Marketing Association, segmented, targeted, and automated emails account for 77% of the ROI from email marketing. So automated emails are one of the top three sources of revenue from email.

As you saw previously, some marketing automation platforms are very complex. Most small businesses and ecommerce stores aren’t going to need or want that, because those have steep learning curves and higher setup costs.

Sending out welcome series and abandoned cart emails doesn’t have to be that complicated. The faster you can start using email marketing automation, the sooner it will generate revenue that you’re missing out on right now. MailPoet blends seamlessly with WordPress and WooCommerce, is easy to learn, and you can have new email marketing campaigns working for your business fairly quickly. Want to try it? 

See MailPoet’s features